CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON PLACE MARKETING

This chapter begins with a historical account of place marketing’s development, incorporating an overview of the place marketing ‘conventional wisdom’ that emphasizes its prevalent prescriptive and normative character. It proceeds to offer a reconstruction of the critical voices through an account of their main arguments. In doing so, two generations of critical voices are spelled out, by offering some critical alternative perspectives that challenge place marketing’s traditional managerially oriented and prescriptive foundation. In the final part of this chapter, we propose an agenda for future research that takes stock of the most recent and promising approaches to envision more inclusive forms of place marketing. Overall, this chapter intends to (a) consolidate the critique of place marketing and establish it within the marketing theory area by articulating it with clarity and (b) to formulate a research agenda that encourages scholars to pursue place marketing research in a way that is more respectful of the needs of less powerful social actors.